


The Raven of Odin

by Dien



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, And Then Everyone Was Spies, CIA, Gen, M/M, Ravenverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-19
Updated: 2013-10-20
Packaged: 2017-12-29 20:34:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1009786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dien/pseuds/Dien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In an alternate universe, Nathan Ingram created IFT on his own, and his college friend joined the CIA instead....</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Penemuel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Penemuel/gifts).



> A somewhat cleaned-up and somewhat tweaked version of a fic I first posted to Tumblr some time ago. AU exploration of a world where Finch works for the CIA, and is Reese's handler.

After the Rangers, training with the Agency is… not quite a disappointment but-- so very much _not_ what he’d expected.

In Arlington, Virginia, there’s a block of office buildings where the carpet is nubby and ugly and the walls are beige and the staff do not look like anybody’s movie-conflated ideas of ‘spies’. It looks, and feels, like the conference rooms and offices of a dull financial firm. Here, John goes through class after class with a group of other men and women— most of them are actually not military, they’re all ages and all ethnicities, most of them chosen not for facility with guns but for fluency in non-American cultures.

He feels out of place, with his knowledge of how to kill a man with the pen that he uses to fill out the endless questionnaires.

The number of people in his classes dwindle, the instructors culling them, one-by-one, with no ceremony and no apparent logic, sending them off to other tasks. John gets up early to run the perimeter of the apartments where they are ~~stabled~~ housed, to do something, because the lack of physical activity and the reading assignments that seem relevant to nothing at all are slowly wearing on him, in a way that even the sleep deprivation with the Rangers had not. He is conscious of cameras watching him and the others. He avoids talking to his fellow students, increasingly wary of traps.

He doesn’t see Mark Snow again, his recruiter, for several weeks, and each time he thinks about approaching one of his quiet, professional instructors instead with a statement of _I’m not sure this is for me, I may need to wash out,_ he decides against it at the last minute.

Good soldier that he is. Carry out orders. See a mission through.

When he does finally see Snow again it’s at a distance, early in the morning, frost on the grass still and nobody else around, which is why he notices them: not one figure, but two. Men in black coats, Snow’s balding head red with the cold, and a slighter, older man with him, a black car parked a little behind them.

They’re watching. Langley is always watching. He’s being evaluated. He lowers his chin to his chest and just keeps running. When he comes around the building the second time they’re gone.

Another week, and the training is getting more interesting, at least. Lockpicking. He knows how to shoot out a lock, but not how to open it with a variety of common household items. This is more like it, maybe, more like what he’d expected when Mark Snow had shaken his hand and said _CIA._

John is focused on the instructor’s suggestions and doesn’t hear the classroom’s door open, but when he looks up there’s a clerk there, an older man in short sleeves and a tie and a pocket protector, thick glasses and unkempt brown hair flecked with gray, with a clipboard and an air that manages to be nervous and bored at the same time.

"Rogers, John?" he calls out, and the instructor looks over, looks to John who’d rather do lockpicking but nods and doesn’t quite salute. He gathers his books and follows the nebbish little man (who has a bad limp) out the door into the hall, thinking bleakly: _This is it._

This is it, they’re cutting him from the program, for whatever reason— now what? What’s he going to do? Re-enlist with the Rangers, maybe? Visit Jessica, interrupt her perfect life with her perfect husband? Right.

Purpose, Mark Snow had spoken of _purpose,_ and he'd listened, but he hasn't found it here in the beige classrooms. The lessons (cameras, surveillance, intel processing) have seemed so disconnected from the real, dangerous world he remembers from Ranger operations. It shouldn't be a big surprise that he's not what they're looking for. Soldiers aren't actually good spies. Soldiers aren't usually subtle.

He distracts himself from his disappointment by reading the nametag of the guy they’ve sent to end his CIA career before it’s even started. The laminated photo ID dangling from a lanyard says he’s _H. Byrd, Data Analyst,_ with a few of the ubiquitous bar codes and strings of digits attached. Security clearance is only one level higher than John’s own non-existent level as a trainee; Byrd has the minimum security authorization to be a CIA employee and nothing higher than that.

A key to Langley’s front door, basically.

It’s not until he realizes they’re headed upstairs, and not down for the exit, does he also realize he’s seen this man before: once, fifty yards away, standing next to Mark Snow on a cold morning.

Byrd is flipping through papers on the clipboard. John watches over his shoulder, knowing that they have to be the Agency’s data on him, but Byrd lowers the clipboard the second he starts looking.

"Well. Everything looks to be in order. Welcome to the CIA, Mr. Rogers," Byrd says. He has a soft voice that hangs onto vowels as if they were advantages. The smaller man swipes his ID card through the door at the end of the hall and gestures him through to-- more offices.

"…that’s it?" John can’t help but ask, at the perfunctory tone to the words, at the utter matter-of-factness. The Rangers had had a ceremony when you passed the brutal training; there’d been a sense of pride— your hellish sergeants looked at you and gave you a not-quite-smile, at least.

This man says it like he might say, _And here’s the coffee room; we have a Friday rotation for whose job it is to clean the microwave._

"That’s it," Byrd answers without turning his head to look at him, and leads him to another door and into an office that looks like several filing cabinets exploded inside.

"Until further notice, Mr. Rogers, you’re assigned to me, as an assistant. Your first job is to help me organize this room."

It’s so, so not what he’d expected, and this time he _would_ be disappointed, but he remembers a morning, grass crackling white under his feet and two figures watching him with unspoken authority and the knowledge that, again, he is being tested. So he bites his tongue and says _Yes, sir,_ and gets to work.

***

John studies his new CO (it's hard to lose the terminology; what's he supposed to call him? His boss? His supervisor?) with an eye honed by the military and an intuition that is just his own. He learns the following things:

Byrd's five-eight, five-nine maybe, exact height a little hard to pin down because of his slouch. John pegs him at one-sixty: probably nerd-skinny when younger, fighting a middle-aged sedentarian's paunch now. Blue eyes (watery, myopic), brown hair (graying, receding), no tan. No wedding ring.

Byrd limps, favoring his right leg. Byrd never turns his head more than fifteen degrees in any direction, and on occasion his right hand tremors finely around a coffee mug that only ever holds weak tea.

Byrd’s shoulders slump with the defeated slouch of the office gopher all around the world: the fifty-something loser stuck on the low end of a bureaucratic totem pole, watching those younger and brighter get promoted around him, and Byrd slinks around the halls and amid the cubicles in a fashion that begs the other personnel to ignore him, and they do, except when a computer misbehaves and then the phone in Byrd’s office rings. A low-level peon. Because someone’s gotta fix the copiers, even in the world of espionage.

Once in the cafeteria he sees two of the guys from his classes, looking sharp and scrubbed in suits, and they see him sitting with Byrd and he can almost read word-for-word what they are thinking from the surprise crossing their faces, the glances to each other— _Rogers, what’s_ he _doing over there, did he screw something up and he’s stuck with busywork?_ The CIA doesn’t always expel its failed prospects, it recycles them, shuffles them into boring and quiet dead ends where the tedium is eventually fatal, and this is what they think has happened to him.

Byrd is consummately one of these failures, competent at the Agency’s busywork but never going to advance to anything beyond data entry and tech support, beyond fingers stained with printer powder and pens in a pocket protector.

It’s one of the most incredible performances John’s ever seen.

The tells of the truth are so subtle that very often he questions his memory of that morning— maybe it was someone else of similar build who also wears glasses, maybe he was wrong and this _is_ busywork— but they come in tiny hints, and twitches, and sidelong looks from Byrd when Byrd doesn’t think he’s looking.

And, of course, there are the papers: every single document he goes through is classified Confidential, at the very least, and he wars with himself a long time wondering if this too is a test: should he read them? Should he not read them? By what calipers is he being judged? He settles for skimming each as he sorts them by date and by topic and by other formula recited for him by Byrd in a dry, wavery voice— and one day he picks up loose black-and-white photos that are possibly images of a uranium enrichment facility, and John knows from the date stamp and the scrawl on the back which folder and mission they belong to, and he heads towards the appropriate cabinet and catches Byrd’s eyes on him, observing what he’s doing before he’d really thought about it himself.

Byrd never looks him in the eye. Byrd’s eyes always drift away like dandelion fluff on the breeze, but there have been just enough slips for him to catch a glimpse of the intelligence that lurks behind that pale watery gaze-- a mind like a machine that processes, processes, processes.

There is no censure from Byrd for his having known where to put the photographs. He grows slightly bolder, and three weeks in he asks a question about one mission, one redacted document, unsure if it will be answered.

It is, to his astonishment— in a thirty-five minute lecture about geopolitical tensions on the Afghan border, about the opium-for-money-for-guns trade, and the Agency’s legacy in equipping insurgency fighters against the Russians, and the astonishing number of American guns and explosives still floating, unaccounted for, in the hands of regional warlords.

Byrd’s never spoken more than fifteen words to him at a go before this and John tries to stifle his shock and absorb, absorb, absorb what Byrd tells him, memorize every fact rattled off at such length. It’s not just the breadth of knowledge, it’s the _depth--_ the way Byrd explains the connections and the domino effects of everything, paints the region as only an expert could possibly understand it, and John has to file this too away in his incomplete picture of the man with the limp and the stiff neck and the laminated ID card that says _Data Analyst. Sec Lvl 1._

He’s given his own name tag ( _J. Rogers, Data Analyst. Sec Lvl 1)_ and spends most of each day in the small office where the explosion of papers never seems to get under control. He will clear off one desk only to find another stack of reports covering it the next morning. The only area free of papers is a world map that takes up the entirety of one wall, dotted with colored thumbtacks and pushpins and bits of thread in a bewildering cat’s-cradle that Byrd will sometimes stand before for twenty, thirty minute stretches, completely unmoving save darting eyes and his lips moving in soundless mutters to himself.

At first he addresses Byrd as Mr. Byrd, or _sir_ , until it becomes clear to him that Byrd really doesn’t give a damn, and then it’s just Byrd, one syllable to fall from the tongue. Saves time, more efficient.

Efficiency becomes its own goal, as John plays file drudge day after day.

Byrd does… whatever it is he does. Sometimes John won’t see him for days on end; the small and windowless office will contain nothing except the papers, and a Post-It note in Byrd’s nigh-illegitimate scrawl directing him to prioritize one stack over the others.

He doesn’t mind being tested, but he damn well wants to know what the rules are, what the criteria are, and whether or not he’s doing well or failing abysmally. Most days the cramped office feels like punishment more than anything else.

He loses his tan. He loses some muscle tone too.

Weeks blur into one another. He and Byrd work in silence, miles apart despite being in a room that’s ten by ten feet, unless he asks questions, and then— if it’s a good question— Byrd will talk. Will explain. If it’s a bad question, a lazy question, a question asked just to hear a human voice in the room or a question aimed at trying to tease out some sense of his purpose here, or Byrd’s tasks, then Byrd shuts him down with a _That information is in the second cabinet, Mr. Rogers_ at best and complete, disapproving silence otherwise.

When he’s not in the office he thinks about the data they’re processing, and works to think of _good_ questions, the kind that will get him answers, that will make Byrd talk and talk.

Byrd eats on a clockwork schedule. John could set his watch by it. Breakfast in the cafeteria at eight. Lunch in the cafeteria at noon. Dinner in the cafeteria at five. Sometimes John joins him, but there is nothing social about it. Byrd doesn’t talk in the cafeteria, not even when John asks Good questions, so they sit, at the same table, on opposites sides of the moon.

Some of Byrd’s invisibility attaches to him by association. Not all, it could never be all: he’s still six-foot-two and he can be stealthy in a jungle, in a forest, but he cannot duplicate that beigeness that Byrd so effortlessly camouflages himself in for this environment… but some. Eyes slide over him that would have lingered three, four months ago.

One morning he comes into the office and there’s someone else there, which is so drastically unexpected ( _wrong,_ he thinks involuntarily) that he freezes, hung in the doorway, staring.

The man is sitting at the desk where he usually sits to sort papers, also wrong; a man as tall as he himself, broad-shouldered, a strong face, an expensive business suit and groomed blond hair. He could be a senator— he has that air of easy public personality— but if he is he’s not one John knows.

There's a laptop open before him, and Byrd has a chair drawn up close and the two men are staring at the screen together, a black screen filled with white symbols and letters.

Byrd doesn't look up, but the stranger does. He registers John's hang-up in the doorway with a curious, half-teasing smile.

"Hello," the man says, and at that Byrd does look up, if only to flick a sidelong glance at John and look right back to the screen.

"My assistant, Mr. Rogers. Mr. Rogers, this is Mr. Ingram. He’s one of our contractors. Close the door please, Mr. Rogers."

The room is tight with two people. It’s awkward as hell with three, with two of them large men at that. The name Ingram rings a distant bell, but John's been too long out of civilian life; he can’t place it. He stands there, back to the shut door, while Ingram swivels side to side in the chair and types away and Byrd studies the code on the screen as if it were the Wednesday meatloaf: something to be terminated with extreme prejudice.

John doesn't know computers past military basics. He does his best to listen, but it's quickly clear that whatever they're discussing is miles beyond his technical knowledge. Byrd asks short, terse questions to which Ingram responds with typed commands that make the computer screen flood with photographs and maps. Phrases like _gait recognition_ and _van Eck phreaking_ and _packet sniffing_ get tossed around. They might as well be Greek to John (except, actually, John would do better with Greek).

In John's (admittedly layman's) assessment, he thinks Byrd is playing skeptic, asking dubious questions about capabilities, and that Ingram is answering with demonstrations.

He stands by the door, hands at the small of his back and feet spread apart. Parade rest.

There are hundreds of confidential and secret and top secret documents lying out in plain view— Ingram doesn’t even have an ID card for John’s eyes to reflexively analyze— and Ingram's smiling and _showing off,_ and John grinds down on instincts that urge him to do things like tackle this man to the ground.

At length Byrd gives a small nod, leans back in his chair with his arms crossed.

"You do seem to have solved most of the difficulties."

"Why _thank_ you, Harry."

 _Harry._ H. Byrd. John files this into the mental file cabinet he’s been constructing, and he watches Byrd for anything, any flinch of reaction, any tell… Maybe his jaw tightens slightly, maybe not. Byrd would be hell in poker.

"You're welcome. The Agency will be in touch. Mr. Rogers will show you out."

Ingram's eyes flicker to him again, and the man chuckles, looks back to Byrd. “Ah, come on— I was thinking you and I could get lunch, catch up on old times..?”

"My schedule’s rather full, Nathan. Mr. Rogers, Mr. Ingram has a driver waiting for him at the front gate. Please make sure he gets there."

 _And nowhere else,_ comes the unspoken line, or at least John thinks he hears that. He doesn’t know why it gives him such satisfaction to lead Ingram out of the building, but it does.

****

Two weeks after that he comes in and again no Byrd, instead a Post-It note saying _Garage 7._ At least he thinks it’s a seven.

There’s one solitary, sleek black car in Garage 7, engine running, a driver waiting. John goes to the back passenger door, opens it, opens his mouth to speak too.

"I’m getting tired of mysterious tests, Byrd—"

"Then it’s good this isn’t one. Get in. We have a plane to catch."

Cognitive dissonance shuts him up as completely as the words: gone is Byrd’s dull office drudge short-sleeves and the thick-framed glasses. Byrd’s in a three-piece suit in gray pinstripe with russet pocket square and accents, looking like he just stepped out of a high-end men’s salon— hair combed from its usual mousy nest into something sharper, something expensive that probably does power lunches. A cane of mahogany topped with gold is on the seat next to him.

More even than the accoutrements, there’s an utter change in Byrd’s demeanor too: a crack of intensity that’s no less striking for all that it’s quiet. A fire banked is still a fire. H. Byrd, Data Analyst, has no fire; this man does.

John eases himself onto the seat, shuts his mouth, and closes his door. The car starts to move.

Byrd hands him a passport— it looks used, well-worn. His own face stares back at him from inside, next to a different name.

"Until further notice, you’re Mr. John Reese, Mr. Reese. I am Mr. Henry Finch. How’s your Arabic, Mr. Reese?"

He takes the passport on automatic, more documents as they’re handed over, mind slipping gears to try to catch up. “…rusty. Been a couple of years.”

 _"Then let us refresh your memory on our way to the airport,"_ Byrd— Finch— answers in fluent Gulf Arabic, and John— John Reese— scrambles to get his mind back in the game.

He has, apparently, graduated.

****

They touch down in Tehran in the middle of the night, after four plane changes and, for Reese, a wardrobe change too— Byrd/Finch had had clothes waiting for him in the car’s trunk, exactly his size, of course his size. A business suit, plain in comparison to Byrd’s own, but quality.

A battered taxi meets them driven by a woman wearing a hijab. Reese struggles to draw up all he’s heard about women’s status in Iran, trying to place if this is normal for a woman to be driving a taxi, and they’re a minute away from the airport already before she turns her face to them and a passing streetlight shows that whatever else she may be, she is not Iranian by birth.

"Safe flight, sir?"

"Safe enough. Kara Stanton, John Reese. Mr. Reese, Kara Stanton. She’s one of our best, and local eyes and ears on the ground."

She smiles, a flash of feral white teeth in the rearview mirror, caught by the headlights of an oncoming car.

"The new meat. Nice to meet you, John Reese. Ever committed a high crime and misdemeanor against a foreign power?"

****

Byrd/Finch never leaves their hotel room, in what is clearly the Westerner-friendly section of Tehran, the tourist-friendly spot also. He unpacks numerous electronics from his briefcase— Reese wonders if he brought any clothes, or just computers— and hands Stanton numerous packets to be delivered around the city.

He wants to ask, _why did you come, why was your presence needed, you could have done this from a location of less risk if it’s all going to be hands-off anyway—_ but he thinks it would be deemed a Bad question, not useful and not answered.

Byrd’s voice echoes in their ears from extremely small speakers as they pick their way through the tourist-oriented bazaar. Hijab or no hijab, by the light of day she’s clearly too white to be a native, as he himself is. They can’t hope to pass as locals, but, Stanton says, there are other ways.

Reese is keyed up. He’s wearing a gun for the first time in months again; it’s like having his right hand back. He sees threats in every shadow, every young man zipping by on a scooter, and Stanton puts a hand on his arm and laughs and says brightly, _Dear, what do you think about these scarves for the kids!_ and in a much lower whisper tells him to chill the fuck out.

"It’s his first field operation, Kara, don’t be too hard on him," Byrd’s voice says in both their ears and Reese resists the urge to get defensive about his record as a supremely skilled special ops soldier. First field operation, his _ass._

He’s off-balance and knows it. The difference between a military mission and a CIA mission seems to be vast, but more disconcerting is that the dry, gray presence he’s come to rely on as both teacher and his only major human contact in several months has…. changed, since Garage 7.

Byrd’s (Finch’s) voice snaps with easy confidence now but beneath that a sort of… _humor_ that takes Reese completely off-guard. There’s a familiarity in his words to Stanton (his use of her first name) that speaks of a long history, to which Reese is a stranger, an intruder. He’s gotten used to thinking of Byrd as _his,_ in some strange sense— his handler, his boss, his mentor even if a strange and distant one— and it’s like suddenly finding out, late in life, that your parent has other children.

Here in Iran, thousands of miles away from Arlington, it’s like Byrd has suddenly come alive.

They mosey around the market for half the day. Kara encourages him to try salted walnuts from vendors, and a carrot juice ice cream float (it’s better than it sounds), and Finch’s voice in his ear flips from English to Arabic with ease, pointing out the local names for the street foods. He tells Kara to bring back a glass of _doogh_ for him.

They do work too. Or rather, Stanton does: he watches carefully and so manages to notice her passing off the packages to various Iranians they meet, the _doogh_ seller and the walnut seller and a woman selling a type of shoe Finch tells him is called a _charoq._

He watches. He observes. He tries to tell his ego to shut up, but can’t help but wonder why he’s even here. He certainly doesn’t seem needed.

After four hours, Stanton purchases a couple of kebabs and leads him into a secluded, sunny courtyard with a fountain, and doves nestled on the warm flagstones. She sits on the fountain’s edge and wordlessly mimes for him to take out his discreet earpiece while sliding out her own.

He hesitates, then follows suit. The proximity to the water’s silvery sound provides a buffer of white noise that he realizes she sought out intentionally.

Reese cups the earbud in his hand in imitation of her own action, looks at her warily, waiting to see what happens next.

"It’s not what you expected, is it," she says with a knowing smile, and he wonders if he’s that transparent, that readable.

"No."

She nods. “It’s not all like this. This is a nice day. Walk around a market, play tourist, don’t get shot at. Trust me, there’s plenty of the bad days too. You’ll get to use all the macho shit.”

Some of his emotions must show on his face; she chuckles and looks into the fountain. “You’re one of Snow’s, aren’t you?”

"…he recruited me, if that’s what you mean."

"Yeah," she answers, "you’ve got that look."

 _What look?_ he wants to ask, exasperated, but he’s wary of bad questions after the months of training— and in hindsight, that is clearly what it had been— by Finch/Byrd, so he says nothing. Kara trails the fingers of one hand through the fountain's water.

"…there’s some things you should probably know. That nobody will tell you."

"And you will?" he challenges softly. "Things _He—”_ (he rubs the ball of his thumb over the earbud) “—doesn’t want you to tell me?”

"Yes," she answers baldly, no guilt at all. "Exactly those sort of things. He was Siskin when I was a trainee; I can tell you a lot more about him. And about Mark."

He feels himself caught at an unmarked fork in the road. There’s no Post-It note to guide him; there’s no voice in his ear to draw the connections and give him context for action, because he took out the earpiece. The temptation to satisfy his curiosity is strong, even if he doesn't know what price she'll ask for.

Is Finch/Byrd/(Siskin) even worth his loyalty? Has the other man actually _done_ anything for him, that he should feel loyalty at all?

"Pass," he says after several long seconds, and Kara smirks as if she’d half-expected that, too.

"Yeah. I’ve been where you are," she says with a shrug, and gets to her feet and puts her earpiece back in. "Come on. Fearless Leader will be waiting."

****

Stanton gives the report back in their hotel room, crisp, professional, relating more things getting done than he’d realized they’d actually accomplished— more messages passed, more signals given than he had noticed. The knowledge of how much he still has to learn briefly stings, but as he has always done, he will take knowledge of failure as incentive to work harder. Finch (Byrd) (Siskin) listens.

"Alright, Kara, thank you," Finch says, leaned back in the room’s one comfortable chair like it’s a throne, his fingers steepled at his chin. King of a shadow realm, spider at the center of an extensive web.

"It’s good to have you back in the field, sir," she says, and gives Reese a wink on her way out.

He waits for instructions. Finch gives him nothing but silence for ten minutes so Reese grunts and goes to take a shower, shrugging out of his jacket and draping it over the back of the room's sofa.

"Mr. Reese," says Finch/Byrd/Siskin, and he pauses, looks over his shoulder to the man in the chair.

"There’s a bug built in to your suit’s top button. You may want to disable it."

Reese stares, then slowly nods. He goes to shower.

Maybe there’s no such thing as graduating, but he thinks he’s getting better at passing the tests.

****

They go back to America, after another week. Things happen: tense moments, like on their return to the airport when Finch calmly tells Stanton that they are being followed, and she agrees, and Reese wonders if he’ll finally have an excuse to use his damned gun but she takes a loop through streets that wouldn’t fit any American-model car and they both seem satisfied that they’ve lost their pursuit and Reese continues to feel useless.

He knows better than to ask questions, any questions, on the plane. He waits until they’re back in America, until they’re back in Arlington, until they’re back in a ten-by-ten room that is awash with paperwork built up in their absence. Reese contemplates tossing a match into the lot of it, and when he steals a look at Finch’s face he thinks he sees a similar sentiment there before Finch becomes Byrd again with a slump of the shoulders and a change of glasses.

"Finch," he says before the transformation can complete itself, and is rewarded with that sidelong flick of sharp alertness, pale gaze _on_ and humming and studying him.

"Yes?"

"You could have just sent me alone."

"….yes," Finch-not-Byrd admits after several seconds, as he limps for the desk.

Reese isn’t willing to leave it there. “Or you could have gone on your own. It’s not like I did anything.”

"You learned, Mr. Reese," Finch answers. "You learned."

He crosses the distance, leans on the desk and looms over Finch-not-Byrd, something easy to do that he’s never even thought about trying before. “What am I learning _towards?”_

Finch leans back in his chair, fingers steepled before his chin like back in Tehran. Looking up at him. For ten seconds Finch says nothing at all and Reese is sure he won’t get an answer.

"Something useful," Finch says at last, then jerks his chin towards the nearest pile of folders and print-outs and maps and grainy photographs. "Let’s start with the satellite imagery, shall we?"

He takes a few breaths, then nods, and goes to file the papers. Something’s changed, between them. Whatever passports Finch gives him, whatever name is on the laminated ID card, there is a part of him that is going to be _Reese_ now, like a brand, like the remembrance of a bullet left on his skin.

This is what Finch is giving him, a skin to grow into; a shape he is supposed to fill although Finch still refuses to tell him what that shape is— _who_ John Reese is supposed to be.

And Byrd is Finch now, similarly. Reese cannot erase the memory of a sharp suit, and the just-as-sharp look in Finch’s eyes as he got to taste the thrill of being _out,_ out of what Reese has begun to suspect is a cage more than an office.

****

Byrd is gone again, Post-It note directions left behind. Reese works through the morning then goes to the cafeteria alone.

It’s Tuesday, so it’s mediocre macaroni, not that Reese cares about such things. Everything beats MREs.

Mark Snow sits down across from him with a smile as warm as a wolf’s.

"Hi, John," he says from above his own plate of macaroni.

"Hi, Agent Snow," he responds, and Snow’s smile widens.

"Here I thought we were friends. Call me Mark."

"Alright."

Snow’s waiting for him to say more, to say anything at all; he’s learned how to stonewall with silence although he doesn’t know why he’s suddenly wary. He’d _liked_ Snow when they’d met, he’d liked his lack of bullshit and his straightforward pragmatism and the fact that Snow had been very upfront about the Agency’s past failures and his own commitment to do better, to make the world safer for American interests.

Snow eats a few bites of macaroni, eyes on him. “You seem to be settling in okay.”

Yeah, he guesses he is. He says as such. Snow arches a brow.

"And how do you like working in the cage?"

"Sorry?"

Snow’s smile definitely has an edge to it this time. “The cage. It’s a pun. Because it’s Byrd’s office, and it's lined with paper.”

"Ah. Right. Of course."

The other man stabs at the pasta. “So? You like it?”

"Beats getting shot."

Snow laughs, like he’s supposed to. “Point. God, I hate pasta Tuesdays. Don’t you? It’s always bargain-basement crap like this.”

"Tastes okay to me," Reese responds, emphasizing his words with an enormous bite.

All pretense of friendliness drops from his Snow’s face; he sets down his fork and laces his hands together and studies Reese like he would a loathsome insect.

“ _I_ was supposed to be his protégé _._ Not _you,”_ Mark Snow informs him. “And you won’t make it. You’ll be a good agent— in some other posting— you’ll get sent to Syria, or Russia, or Assfuckistan, once you fail one of his goddamn infinite tests, and you’ll be good enough there, but you won’t be the Anointed and you should disabuse yourself of that notion now; it’ll make your life a lot fucking easier.”

"Didn’t know that was what I was aiming for," Reese answers while he processes all of this. "Thought I was filing paperwork."

Mark’s mouth twists with a bitterness so strong Reese wonders how the other man walks around with it and pretends to be normal.

Then Byrd’s there, at the side of the table, looking down at them both through his thick glasses like some gimpy version of Professor Peabody, and nobody could possibly ever feel threatened by this man except that Snow visibly flinches.

"Your lunch was over five minutes ago, Mr. Rogers," Byrd says in tones that can only be called peevish, and Reese offers Mark a fake smile of fake aw-shucks-the-boss-is-here and stands with his tray.

Byrd limps with him for the cafeteria exit; John slows his pace to match his without thinking about it. They both pause at the trash can for John to scrape his tray off into it.

"He is right about one thing," Finch says with a thoughtful little _uhmnn_ noise flicking the ends of his words.

"Yeah?"

"Yes. Tuesday pasta is terrible. How’s your Mandarin Chinese, Mr. Reese?"

"Non-existent."

"Well, then; it appears we’re working on languages for the rest of the day."

****

He tries to learn more than just what Finch is willing to teach him for the missions. He tries to learn _who_. All the details he’s observed are rehashed on sleepless nights. Finch likes tea. Finch speaks several languages. Finch is easily the smartest man he’s ever met. Finch has a limp.

Byrd with his quiet voice and the overall bearing of an insurance claims adjuster is not anyone’s idea of James Bond, but then, that’s where his strength is, isn’t it? He doesn’t look like anyone’s dramatic image of a spy. He looks like a certified public accountant.

He thinks of subtler ways to ask questions, and asks them, and it yields nothing— well, actually, it yields him one direct response to indicate that Finch knows what his question about the Agency’s policies in the late 1970s is actually asking:

"That won’t work, Mr. Reese."

"I’m sorry?"

"Trying to ascertain whether I was with the Agency in the time frame mentioned. It won’t work."

"I was just asking a history question, Finch." In the privacy of the ten-by-ten room, this sobriquet goes unchallenged.

Finch’s eyes track back to his computer’s dusty screen. “Agency policies over the years are a matter of public record, except where they’re not, so I suggest you look up the answer to your ‘history question’ on microfiche and avoid such clumsy subterfuges in the future.”

Despite himself, Reese smiles at his own stack of photocopied and much-annotated maps. “Okay. Hey, Finch?”

"Yes, Mr. Reese?"

"When did you join the Agency?"

He watches for it. There’s a pause, then the tiniest answering lip curl from the other man.

"You’re on a need-to-know-basis, Mr. Reese, and you don’t need to know."

Not an answer, no, but smiles are their own victory.

****

He craves another field mission, even if it’s just to go somewhere where someone like Stanton will still do all the work, he doesn’t care, he needs to get out into the world again and out of the room.

Maybe Byrd feels his restlessness (or maybe _Finch_ shares it), but the phone rings at two-thirty in the morning and wakes him to Finch’s voice. _Garage 6, Mr. Reese._

This time it’s one of the former member-countries of the USSR, and this time there’s no Stanton. He’s Jack Ross for the duration of this trip, American investor here with his financial adviser Alan Partridge, scouting out opportunities for American dollars except things get interesting and he gets to use his gun.

He gets to push Finch(-Byrd-Partridge-Siskin) to the ground, drop their attackers with three perfectly-aimed shots. He gets to be useful.

He’s unhurt; Finch has some bruises from the shove and rubs at his neck every time he thinks Reese isn’t looking. It takes a long time for Reese to find ice at half-past-midnight in a country where he doesn’t speak the official language, and even his Russian’s not great.

"Thank you," Finch says when he returns with it (the first time he has ever said such to Reese), and reaches for the bag, but Reese shakes his head and gestures for Finch to turn around and let him do it. There’s a long silence in the very shabby room where they’re holed up, and then Finch obliges.

John is beginning to understand who John Reese is. He is the powerful hands, and the whole body for someone who no longer has that for himself, someone who misses them, who’s operating at half-efficiency without them and is having trouble accepting that limitation.

And if he is to be Finch’s hands, then he’ll be them in the small things too.

****

Their last night in Lithuania, a better hotel room than the bolthole they’d found after the attack. Finch has insisted Reese get clean, so he’s showering.

Reese has been practicing being invisible on Finch’s suggestion: a ragged coat he’d bought off a homeless man for fifty _litas,_ neither shaving nor showering for the last four days, buying a bottle of bottom-shelf vodka and pouring it over his clothes to get that special four-day-drunk smell as well. He’s lounged around church doors and bus stations, held out a cup for change, and Finch has given him countless tips on how to perfect the disguise. _Slouch, Mr. Reese. Slur, Mr. Reese. No, drop your eyes, in this incarnation you will never make eye contact— have you ever seen a whipped dog? That is what you are right now._

He tries to imagine Finch doing this; it’s very nearly impossible, because Finch is fastidiously clean even as Byrd and he has trouble wrapping his brain around the idea of Finch managing to not shave or not shower for one day, let alone four.

It’s funny. It’s funny, and it probably shouldn’t be— they’re in a foreign country, operatives deep in the woods, and the men he shot have been pronounced dead and there’s a manhunt on— things should be serious and tense and yet Reese feels that it’s all a massive game of pretend. Thinking of Finch with a four-day beard makes him snicker to himself, and watching Lithuanian police walk by him without a second glance is a little buzz part adrenaline rush and part smugness.

Finch interrogates him as to his observations, his experiences, and Reese sees that hungry light in his eyes again. Finch is using him to vicariously live. Reese doesn’t mind.

He emerges scrubbed and clean-jawed from the tiny bathroom and he doesn’t bother finding clothes. Finch is working away on his laptop, like he often is; Reese pads barefoot across the floor and stands closer than he needs to until Finch deigns to take notice.

Finch says nothing, which Reese figures is the closest he’s going to get to assent, so he slides the computer off Finch’s lap and reaches for his handler’s belt. Finch looks up at him with an utter lack of surprise. He’d like to surprise him, sometime, but it looks like this isn’t the way to do it.

He still wants to do it anyway.

"Seduction won’t make me suddenly verbose, Mr. Reese," Finch informs him, and Reese shrugs and unbuckles a very nice belt. Finch carries on, watching his face for reaction: "Kara found that very frustrating."

He knows why all of Finch’s aliases are birds at moments like this— when Finch is giving him _this look,_ eyes like agates as sensitive to motion as a hunting raptor's.

In Iran this revelation might have made him jealous. In Arlington it might have done the same. But he’s the only one here, and Finch isn’t saying no, so he just slides that belt out of Finch’s trousers and starts on his fly, climbing naked onto the bed between his boss’s legs.

He gets to add new details to the mental filing cabinet. Finch isn’t shy about using his nails. Finch has a surprising number of scars beneath the suit— or maybe not so surprising— and a surprising amount of wiry strength to his body as well. Another surprise: Finch curses when he comes, obscenities as carefully orchestrated as everything else about him but sounding surreal from his lips.

After, he tests Finch. Tests his warning that he won’t be talkative. He doubts Finch was wrong— he would even be disappointed if Finch suddenly rolled over and showed him truth— but it’s become part of the game, now.

Finch seems to know they’re playing. Finch will follow their particular pattern and reward the _interesting_ questions with a moment’s consideration, and, yes, with answers. Of a sort.

"How did you get hurt?" Reese asks as his callused fingers trace the razor-straight scar on the back of Finch’s neck.

"I fell," comes the deadpan answer.

"Down the stairs?" Reese can’t help but ask, smirking.

"Through the cracks."

"What would you give to be able to be back in the field full-time?" Reese asks ten minutes later, his hand on Finch’s cock, making him curse again.

"Oh, fuck you," Finch pants without malice, gripping at John’s hair and rocking his hips. "Your life. The lives of— quite a lot of— godddamn— people— probably—"

Reese accepts this. Reese rides him with his hand until Finch is creating new and inventive oaths, leaving a hatch-pattern on Reese’s shoulders with his nails.

"Why did you pick me?" Reese asks an hour later, when neither of them can move, and this one Finch doesn’t answer.

The next day they slip like ghosts through the border, hours in a hotwired car to Moscow and then another plane back to the ten-by-ten cage, lined with paperwork, and to a world that only exists in two dimensions on their wall.

****

In Spain Finch gets shot. It’s not serious, not by Reese’s standards (nor, he thinks, by Finch’s) but Langley thinks differently and when they are stateside again Finch is given an envelope whose contents he doesn’t let Reese read but whatever it says makes Finch angry, actually angry, an anger Reese can see in his clenched jaw and the exaggerated tremor of his right hand.

Finch exorcises this by attacking the paperwork, or Byrd does, and Reese feels briefly completely useless again when he sees the pace at which Finch can rip through it on his own. Finch only needs an assistant because he gets bored. The map is populated with a whole new culture of pins overnight, appearing like fungi; Finch types emails at a staccato machine-gun pace that are sent off to Langley and the offices in Arlington hum with a sudden activity and a round of phone calls that Reese casually eavesdrops on when he goes to get tea and coffee— agents hurriedly shifting blame to other agents for a hundred crises that have all developed in the last twenty-four hours.

Reese wonders if any of them know that it’s Byrd’s doing, that the reason everyone’s asses are in collective slings is because harmless little Byrd in his windowless office is angry and is whacking hornet nests with his vast, vast stick of knowledge.

Reese wonders if any of them know that the vast bulk of the ‘intelligence’ of the Central Intelligence Agency is personified in the form of H. Byrd. In some ways, Finch _is_ the Agency.

Snow might know, maybe, but Snow’s not around. Reese would see him if he were, because Reese is lingering outside of the room as much as he can, since he’s by no means exempt from Finch’s wrath and when he’d attempted to ask what was wrong his reward had been to transcribe sixty-three pages of field reports by hand “for verification purposes.”

That one had been a Bad question, apparently.

***

 _Garage 2,_ says the Post-It note on a gray and drizzly morning, and Reese relaxes, since it’ll be good for them both to get out of the country and maybe Byrd will be tolerable again as Finch.

But there is no Finch in the car. Only a dossier, and a passport, and plane tickets to Cairo.

Reese stares out the passenger window as the car heads for Ronald Reagan International Airport, his eyes fixed on the raindrops sliding down the glass. He hunts patterns in the rivulets, patterns that don’t exist, but it’s a behavior that Finch has trained him to do reflexively, compulsively by this point.

Arlington drops away behind them. He reads the dossier twice. It’s an assassination in all but name. It shouldn’t be too hard. If this is really just a mission. If this is not being sent away, being posted somewhere on the other side of the world in “Assfuckistan.”

Failure or graduation, either one is the same if he’s being sent away.

He flips through the passport since the dossier gives him no answers. It’s in the name of James Hawke, which makes him quirk a brow before carrying on. Finch’s identities are always innocuous birds, harmless birds. Never birds of prey. He’s looked up enough of them now.

Nothing Finch does is random, even if the rain is.

There’s a pattern here: a code that Finch has trained him to decipher, an answer if he asks the right question.

John Reese is in Egypt before it comes to him. The rain of Virginia is a memory; Cairo’s skies are white-hot and dry as bones. Outside the city there is a man, a boy really, training a falcon to hunt with gobbets of meat and bloodstains in the sand.

He watches the falcon hang in the sky, wild, yellow-eyed. He watches the falcon dive screaming. The youth calls the bird back to him with a lure and a whistle.

He understands.

Finch has been grounded, but his hunting bird can still fly free. He will take to the air, seek and kill as his master bids, and return to tell him what he saw.

 


	2. (one of the times that finch screwed reese)

At first he thinks it might be because of the injuries, why Byrd (Finch) lets him top— that with the stiffness in his spine it’s just plain easier for Finch (Byrd) to take the passive role, to lie there and let John do most of the work. To let John fuck him.

He makes the mistake of thinking that this means Finch is giving up anything, that this is any sort of victory or point scored.

Finch calls him on it— not with words, he doesn’t need to do that— if you need something spelled out for you in something as mundane as _words,_ you’re not smart enough to be working for him. Finch disdains explaining anything… but doesn’t mind _informing_ you of your misconceptions, your ignorance. That, he has fun with.

So it is that while Reese is balls-deep in him, his forearms braced on either side of Finch’s scarred, pale shoulders, his chest heaving as he pounds into his boss’s body— so it is that while sweat is dripping from his skin down onto Finch’s own— that he tries to focus on Finch, to see if Finch is gone too, if Finch is trembling and on the edge and hostage to Reese’s cock.

Finch’s eyes are open and clear and looking straight at him. Finch gives him a smile, that little smile, cool and distant as if he weren’t having his prostate slammed into on every single thrust (and Reese knows he damn well is), as if he weren’t also sweating, or as if his sweat were merely incidental.

Finch rolls his hips and squeezes around him some way that shorts out his vision, that kills his lungs, that makes him come.

The smile’s burned onto his retinas. The wordless but perfectly clear cipher for: _Do you honestly think that the position of your cock means I’m not the one fucking you, John?_


	3. Sultry (Byrd/Stanton)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Backstory drabble, prequel to Raven)

It's the dry season in Bali, which means it's only, you know, 65% humidity.  
  
Kara sags in their hotel room. No AC. A fan throbs overhead like a migraine. She pulls off bright _batik_ layers that he'd bought for her in the market.  
  
"You adjust," Byrd says, his voice the only dry thing here.  
  
"Yeah?" she asks. "That's why your shirt's soaked too, huh?"  
  
He purses his thin lips. She grins. Waits for his irritated look before licking her own.  
  
She rides him on the bed until they've soaked the cheap sheets.   
  
They shower with a lot of mutual biting.


End file.
